Here’s the thing about women. One of the things, anyway.
They save us from ourselves. I know what you’re thinking. Okay, I don’t know exactly what you're thinking but if, you’re a guy, you’re probably thinking something along the lines of – no! And if you’re a girl, you’re probably thinking – he’s just trying to get laid or else he’s gay.
You’re both wrong but I wouldn’t mind getting laid.
I think about all my experiences with guys (not those kind of experiences, you pervert). Every memory involves pain or humiliation.
I used to be a Marine. I know what you’ve heard; once a Marine always a Marine but whatever. I have no problem with not being associated with that firm anymore. The point is that you’ve got a large group of guys that didn’t make the football team or couldn’t be a cop because of some mistake or lack of talent. Penis envy. That’s my take on it, anyway. How else would you explain the size of the guns and the hazing? Marines are brainwashed to believe that they can stop bullets and walk on water.
They can’t. I tried both and they both hurt and humiliated me.
Never mind the pain, it’s the humiliation. Think about a man you know, that doesn’t have a woman. Are you thinking of one? He’s a dork, isn’t he? Of course he is and it's not because he's a dork that he has no woman but because he has no woman that he's a dork. That’s what women save us from – ourselves.
Without the influence of the female chromosome we tend to resort to a life of instant dinners, comic books and TV. Don’t even try and deny it, you guys who are reading. It’s true and you know it. When left to our own accord we can spend hours talking about the best artist for X-Men and why Jamie Lee Curtis’ boobs are nice but don’t quite compare Brittany Spears’ younger, nubile ones that are plastered all over the internet. I know this and I don’t watch MTV or surf the web.
Imagine the ones who do.
Let me put it to you this way: "up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, select, start". This means absolutely nothing to most women, but every guy knows that this is the code to Contra for 30 guys. A few guys will even realized that it's a 2-player game because I pushed "select".
Get a bunch of guys together (especially if there’s alcohol involved) and you’re bound to see a few arm wrestling matches, bets on who can drink some nasty concoction and annoying hugging and “I love you mans”. You’ve been there – you’ve seen it.
That’s what guys do.
We all think of ourselves as James Bond or something but we’re dorks. We really are. Girls are the only thing keeping us from devolving into overweight, Cro-Magnon types that eat Mac and Cheese out of the pot. We’d be watching Die Hard and trying to find a clean glass (one that wasn’t used as an ashtray or dip spit).
The “Guy Dream” isn’t based in reality. It’s based in our own perverted mind. Basically, we want to be like lesbians – feared by men and loved by many different women. That’s why relationships fail. Never mind all the hooey about co-dependency or intimacy issues. Mostly, it’s ‘cause we’re lost in a world of super heroes and scantily clad damsels in distress.
When you ask us what we’re thinking and we say, “nothing”. It’s because, while you lean against the fogging windows of our Jetta (that you made us buy), thinking of all those Meg Ryan movies, we’re trying to figure out if we could open the trunk while the car was speeding down the highway. This might sound stupid to someone who thinks chocolate impacts their day but you never know if ninjas are going to attack in a helicopter.
It happens all the time in action movies. One day, it will probably happen to us. At least, that’s what we secretly all hope.
Think about your boyfriends before you started dressing him. I know it was band T-shirts and hooded sweatshirts (comfortable, but holes bigger than the ones that sunk the Titanic). I bet he lived off Raman and Microbrews (when he was feeling upscale). The couch was his best friend, second only to the remote control and some stained gym shorts. I guarantee there’s porn somewhere in the house and he still has socks from grade school.
That’s what we do. We hoard stuff and pee off things. Testosterone poisoning.
For all the bitching I could do about women, none of it could change the fact that, when she was imagining her wedding gown I was playing GI Joe, upset when I found out that Snake Eyes didn’t talk. Seriously, that was a bummer. It’s true that most girls I’ve met lately have weird issues but, I would bet that, left to their own devices, they wouldn’t make a top 10 list of women over 45 they want to bone or try and smoke 5 packs of cigarettes in 2 hours. That’s what we do.
We’re driven towards self-destruction and not even in a cool, angst-ridden, poetic way. We do it, not because we have a point but because someone bet us or dared us that we couldn’t do it.
Here’s another thing: having a sweet car, even if it's in the shop, is just as cool as pulling up to Radio City in that same, sweet car. That’s why we drive the shit that we drive – for the stories. Any story that starts out with the phrase, “So I’m driving my ’62 Lincoln, the Clash blaring and some under aged cheerleader in the back seat…” is bound to evoke some high fives.
Sorry ladies. That’s the beginning of a damn good story. While you pine over some baby-faced senior and wipe your nose after reading about some bed-headed poet that proposed with long-stemmed roses, we’re trying to see if it’s possible to drink an entire thing of ketchup or we've nailed our skateboard to the ironing board (which was never used anyway) and we're going down the stairs in it.
I think that most of us know that we’re doomed to a life of J. Crew and potpourri as you reinvent us. We know that the lightsabre desire will be traded in for the leash of a small, bug-eyed dog that we walk after work. A job that we have, no doubt, to pay off the debt you racked up at Banana Republic. Our dream of fully loaded Hummers is replaced with the dream of a CD player in our minivan full of carseats and empty, crushed Capri-Suns. We know, in the back of our minds, that champagne and tuxedos laced with guns and mini cameras is a dream but it’s our dream and we'd like to think it MIGHT happen. Understand that and you’ve figured us out.
Now, if you can just get us to get rid of our Cabo San Lucas tattoo and little black book. You’ll have found yourselves a perfectly good Romeo, just don't expect us to talk like that or give up all our ripped T-shirts.
Happy Hunting.